It's the Villagers' world, we just are smothered by it

I don't know if Judge Sotomayor would make a fine Supreme Court Justice or not. I had never heard about her until yesterday. But this is the world we live in:

Few outside the White House know whether the Sotomayor chatter is based on anything other than her popularity among center-left jurists, although her name has been the subject of conversation among some top officials recently. Sotomayor is seen as a compassionate voice for the underprivileged, and she has a solid, if unspectacular, record of jurisprudence. (For that reason alone, I don't know if she'll make the short list; Obama seems to go for the superlatives.)

Conservative talk radio hosts have begun impugning Sotomayor's credibility. And the respectable intellectual center -- see Jeffrey Rosen's case against her temperament and inherent intellectual abilities -- is beginning to have doubts.

Emphasis mine, as you might imagine because here's Rosen:

I haven't read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor's detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It's possible that the former clerks and former prosecutors I talked to have an incomplete picture of her abilities. But they're not motivated by sour grapes or by ideological disagreement--they'd like the most intellectually powerful and politically effective liberal justice possible. And they think that Sotomayor, although personally and professionally impressive, may not meet that demanding standard. Given the stakes, the president should obviously satisfy himself that he has a complete picture before taking a gamble.

As Andy Serwer and Glenn Greenwald (and, yes, many snarkier others) have already pointed out, Rosen didn't make a case. He made an anonyously sourced, bitching by the coffee maker, hit piece that is now being used by intellectually lazy conservatives as support for their notion that white men -- the only people on the planet with the "credentials" to be on the Supremes -- are once again being discriminated against.

Keep in mind, her name has not even been sent up as a trial balloon, according to Ambinder. But it's never too early to attack the character of a "left o'center" judge who also happens to be female and of Puerto Rican heritage.

Keep in mind, it wasn't Mess-o-potamia or Katrina that forced the scales from conservatives' doe eyes over GW Bush. It was Harriet Miers, despite the dog whistling.